By Dan Wood for the Daily Campus

The William Benton Museum of Art held a reception Thursday afternoon debuting four new exhibits focused on the central theme women in art.

The featured exhibits were “WORK IT” composed of oil paintings primarily from Ellen Emmet Rand, “Objectifying Myself: Works by Women Artists from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts,” “Liz Whitney Quisgard: An Installation” of textile based art, and Stanwyck Cromwell’s “Progression Then & Now.”

The entire museum featured themes of women, but the works that covered the display space comprised a wide range of mediums, materials and styles.

Some were objectively feminine or feminist in nature whilst others were not so fast to give up what they had to say.

The first and most prominent works displayed were created by Ellen Rand. Rand was one of the most important and prolific portrait painters in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century.

Her works include portraits of Henry James, artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and over 800 other artists, industrialists, scientists and politicians.

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By Susan Dunne for the Hartford Courant

For centuries, male artists have created portraits of women, presenting the women as they chose and often using those women to represent concepts that were all about the artist and not about the subject. After a while, women were bound to get tired of that.

An exhibit at the Benton museum at UConn takes on this subject head-on, beginning with the title of the show. “Objectifying Myself” showcases the work of dozens of female artists who have created work that reflected their own lives, their own thoughts, their own self-images. Some of the work takes the form of self-portraits that push the boundaries of self-portraiture. Even if they don’t depict the artists accurately, that was a decision the artists made. They are literally objectifying themselves.

“There are no bodies, just objects. These are not traditional self-portraits,” said Nancy Stula, director of the Benton, who chose 43 works from the collection of women’s art at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. “These feminist artists are trying to reclaim their bodies from the male gaze.”

Artist Julie Heffernan spelled out this philosophy in a 2013 interview. “I wanted to paint the figure but did not want to objectify women. I was addressing that concern during my still life phase; taking my own body out of the painting but calling it a self-portrait anyway, was a way of saying ‘I’m not this physical body alone; I’m this cornucopia of experiences, and pictures in my head’.”

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These virtual exhibits feature some lesser-known works by Reginald Marsh, an American painter defined by his gritty images of New York City. They instead focus on his painting of locomotives and Havana landscapes.

Steaming Ahead: Reginald Marsh Watercolors of Locomotives
Reginald Marsh Watercolors of Havana

These exhibitions were made possible by the generosity of the Robert T. Leo Jr Exhibition Fund.

By Francesca Colturi for the Daily Campus

UConn’s 50th annual Faculty Art Exhibition was about more than reminding the university of its talented fine arts faculty. The opening reception on Thursday evening focused on a resounding theme of freedom of expression in the chaotic world of art and the chaotic reality of our world today.

“I know it’s not easy to bring together so many visions in such a harmonious fashion,” said Anne D’Alleva, dean of the School of Fine Arts at UConn, in her gracious speech to faculty and museum staff.

With varied artworks from nearly 20 UConn art faculty hanging on the walls of the Benton Museum’s East Gallery, students with dreadlocks mingled between grey haired docents, eating cheese and swaying alongside a bassist and pianist.

Art and art history department head Cora Lynn Deibler followed on the microphone soon after D’Alleva, filling the room with choice words of inspiration. Deibler quoted a poem about the Vietnam War and an opinion column titled, “How artists change the world.” But her own words resonated the loudest. “Speak however you must to support the freedom of expression and the arts. Just don’t be silent,” Deibler said.

In the center of the gallery stood four inflated installations of grey teardrops with a nuclear essence and massive black lettering, created by Brandon Bultman. Around the corner were portraits of a chimpanzee named Toddy taken by Frank Noekler, a temple honoring delivery pizza, stacked by John O’Donnell, and framed napkins illustrated by Allison Paul.

Each bore a small plaque and fostered the buzz of conversation.

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By Kenneth Best for UConn Today

The “UConn Reads: Sacred Ground” exhibition at the William Benton Museum of Art is based on Eboo Patel’s 2012 book Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America, which outlines a vision of America where people of all faiths can make a country where diverse traditions can thrive side by side.

The exhibit opened just days before the executive order on immigration banning refugees and citizens from seven Muslim majority nations.

Patel, born in India to a Muslim family and raised in Chicago, is the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, which builds the interfaith movement on university campuses. In Sacred Ground, he writes that suspicion and animosity toward American Muslims has increased, rather than subsided, and alarmist rhetoric once relegated to the fringes of political discourse has become mainstream with pundits and politicians routinely invoking the specter of Islam as a menacing, deeply anti-American force.

“There are a million competing priorities on college campuses, and so our goal is to make interfaith work a higher priority,” Patel told the Religion & Politics websitewhen his book was published. “Our theory of change is that if you can inspire a critical mass of college students to do this … then the chances of them being interfaith leaders throughout their lives, whether they go into college chaplaincy or medicine, is much higher.”

In the Benton exhibit, organized by award-winning Massachusetts photographer Diana Barker Price, several international artists share their own visions of pluralism through their art, accompanied by excerpts from Patel’s book.

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